Bonnaroo: An Afternoon of Smart Female Singers and Songwriters

This one’s for the ladies. Actually that was Ludacris’s line as he introduced one of his many celebrations of lust and intoxication, setting off squeals, fist pumps and shout-alongs in a wildly appreciative arena-size crowd that swarmed well beyond This Tent. He had a backup band with him, not that I could get close enough to see it onstage.

But I digress. My Friday afternoon at Bonnaroo was full of smart female singers and songwriters: gentle and raucous, poppy and strange, openhearted and enigmatic, sometimes all at once. There was Sharon Jones, pouring on tearful, assertive soul singing over the letter-perfect golden-age funk of her band, the Dap-Kings. There was Feist, turning her old songs inside out and playing her latest ones with delicately nuanced singing and mean, cutting lead guitar.
There was St. Vincent — Annie Clark and her band — calmly sustaining her supple melodies and clearly enunciating every ambiguous lyric, then blasting them with distorted power chords or quick-fingered shredding. There was Tune-Yards — Merrill Garbus and her band — looping herself into electro-African funk and, later for a discerning few, playing guitar noodles, band riffs and a full-fledged song in a live score for a silent Buster Keaton short. There was Yuki Nagamo of Little Dragon, a Swedish band, singing pop melody snippets while the band built brittle synth-pop arrangements around her, starting out sparse and getting thicker and nuttier with each layer.

There was Laura Marling, singing her folky, mysterious fables with a serene glow. There was Sandra St. Victor, of the fondly remembered New York City band the Family Stand, singing Sly and the Family Stone repertory with a jazzy band that was led by the slide trumpet player Steven Bernstein and that included Bernie Worrell, from Parliament-Funkadelic, on keyboards.

And there was Trixie Whitley, with her dusky, haunted voice, introducing moody songs from an album she just completed with Thomas Bartlett (a k a Doveman), who was playing keyboard. The songs, some with spoken-word passages, held cryptic images of love, faith and obsession; she dedicated one, “Strong Blood,” to her father, the blues singer Chris Whitley.

I don’t know if those were the “independent ladies” Ludacris had in mind. But independent is exactly what they were.